No, the company didn’t go out of business. It was taken private by its management, after being a public company for three years. From the Baltimore Sun morning e-mail:
Educate becomes a private company
Educate Inc. has completed its transition into a private company, ending its three-year run on public markets.
Best known for its Sylvan tutoring centers, the Baltimore company, which was purchased in a management-led buyout, traded for the last time on the Nasdaq yesterday.
The investor group that purchased the company is led by chief executive officer R. Christopher Hoehn-Saric, other executives and affiliates of Sterling Capital Partners and Citigroup Private Equity. They paid $8 a share for the company in the deal valued at $535 million.
The company announced this week that more than 75 percent of shareholders approved the deal, which came as the firm has struggled with poor product sales.
Internal reorganization was swift. The company’s website carried this note this morning:
On June 13, 2007, through a merger transaction, Edge Acquisition, LLC became the owner of Educate, Inc. In a related series of simultaneous transactions, the companies which were part of Educate, Inc. have been split into the following independent companies:
Educate Services, which includes Sylvan Learning, Catapult Learning, and Schulerhilfe;
Educate Online, Inc., which includes Catapult Online and eSylvan;
Progressus, Inc.; and
Educate Corporate Centers Holdings, Inc., which is a franchisee of various Sylvan Learning and owner of Sylvan Learning Centers.
The companies are now operating independently to better serve students, families and schools across the country. To learn more about the merger and related transactions, click here.
Making a profit delivering education is rare. Milton Friedman notwithstanding, free market rules do not apply to educational enterprises in the same way they do to other services. This is one more example, or set of examples, that should give pause to any rational person considering making public schools “compete” for money to improve education for any child, especially any group of children. Sylvan Learning Centers are considered to be the top of the heap in their niche; Hooked-on-Phonics is a cliché success story. And they “struggle with poor product sales.”
I hope the company finds the education answers, the magic bullets, and can retail them at affordable prices.
The answer, by the way, probably is not 42.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Photos do not encourage me. The residue on the sides of the vault is a rust color. That could be from the red soil (does Tulsa have red soil?) — or it could be from rust from the car.
Here’s hoping the car was protected from the water . . .
Official opening is set for tomorrow, June 15, 2007.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Especially near the end of the school year, every teacher gets requests to “show a movie.” My collection of videos on specific history events is not what they have in mind. Short subjects related to the course don’t qualify, either.
The kids want an escape from classwork. I just can’t justify it.
But there have been times that I wondered whether a movie wouldn’t be appropriate to explain some part of history or economics. For example, in one economics class, the entire group was stumped by the concept of a “run on the bank,” of the sort that prompted President Franklin Roosevelt to declare the “bank holiday” in March 1933. I wished at that moment that I had a copy of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” to show both the economic conditions that prevailed in much of America at the time, and to show what a run on a bank looks like.
Then I started wondering about all the other stuff that movie could illustrate.
I had a principal who complained about showing videos — which struck me as very odd — and his complaints escalated until he passed out copies of copyright rules. In discussion, it finally became clear to me that he was opposed to running Hollywood, entertainment movies in classes. He didn’t bother to distinguish between my showing of the life of Theodore Roosevelt from PBS from “Beverly Hills Cop” — but he’s gone. I find I share his general revulsion for just slapping in a Hollywood movie to keep the kids quiet.
In the last year I’ve been asked to step in to show “Hitch” in a business communication class, and “The Money Pit” in a Spanish class. “Iron Monkey” could be related to world geography. These exercises generally are wastes of time, and of course, money.
But I also was asked to monitor a showing of “Charley” for a psychology class, and “Napoleon” for a world history class. The psychology class had several questions to pursue closely related to the course; the kids were generally lulled to sleep by Napoleon.
But why not, with careful groundwork, show “It’s a Wonderful Life” in economics, as supplement to the units on banking, the depression, the creation of the Fed, and general history?
Teach with Movies? Great idea. Have you used this site? Anybody know how well it works?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
If you’re in the Washington, D.C., area, get on over to the University of Maryland tonight for the junior performance and documentary finals, or tomorrow morning for the senior performance and documentary finals of the National History Day competitions.
Remember the old World Book maps of states that featured oil drilling derricks and cows in Texas, and shocks of wheat in Kansas? This is just that kind of map, updated for commerce connected with air travel, showing commerce density and direction hour by hour.
I’m thinking, one quiz would be to name the sites of most action. Another would be to calculate how many people are in the air at any given time (notice the count of the number of airplanes; you’ll have to assume about 100 people per aircraft, or more if you can find figures; notice there are no fewer than 4,000 aircraft in the air at any time over the U.S. — ponder that figure for a while, considering an average cost of more than $10 million per aircraft, the miles covered, and compare it to the maps showing the voyages of European explorers to America . . .)
What other maps can your kids make? Water flows of rivers? Train commerce? Highway commerce? Food transportation?
Geography should be an awfully fun topic to teach, and even more fun topic to learn, no?
Can you figure out some way to make this work in a classroom?
Science Daily reports that a team at UCLA working with a lot of others completed an 11-year project to map out Rome as it appeared when it was the commercial and political capital of the western world, three centuries into the first millennium:
“Rome Reborn 1.0″ shows almost the entire city within the 13-mile-long Aurelian Walls as it appeared in A.D. 320. At that time Rome was the multicultural capital of the western world and had reached the peak of its development with an estimated population of one million.
“Rome Reborn 1.0” is a true 3D model that runs in real time. Users can navigate through the model with complete freedom, moving up, down, left and right at will. They can enter important public buildings such as the Roman Senate House, the Colosseum, or the Temple of Venus and Rome, the ancient city’s largest place of worship.
As new discoveries are made, “Rome Reborn 1.0” can be easily updated to reflect the latest knowledge about the ancient city. In future releases, the “Rome Reborn” project will include other phases in the evolution of the city from the late Bronze Age in the 10th century B.C. to the Gothic Wars in the 6th century A.D. Video clips and still images of “Rome Reborn 1.0” can be viewed at http://www.romereborn.virginia.edu.
Now we need to wonder: Will it be available for classroom use?
It would be interesting to take into effect that teaching is one of the few jobs where people expend large quantities of their own money to do their job. I was a principal in a large urban district before I left education for a private sector consulting job. Part of the reason I left was the paper rationing that occurred during my last two years on the job. Our school district limited our teachers to three sheets of paper per student per week in an attempt to cut costs. Even the best, most engaging hands-on learning takes more than three sheets per week. Add in the lunch menus, report cards, and parent letters that need to go home and it would guarantee that our paper supply usually ran dry by March 1 or so and my teachers ending up buying their own paper.
Could you imagine the uproar that would occur in the mortgage department of a bank if suddenly employees were required to buy their own copy paper? Why is that acceptable for our teachers?
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service even has a specific standard deduction for teachers to use to cover the materials they take to the classroom, that would be supplied by other employers, that should be supplied by the schools. Isn’t it odd that we make provisions in the tax code to try to offset this error, rather than try to fix it?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Kerouac appears in almost all U.S. history texts for high schools, and is to cover the post-World War II poetry mentioned in the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS).
Poet and author Jack Kerouac was the “King of the Beats.” The Beats were a group of poets and authors who gave rise and verse to the “Beat Generation.” The word “beat” is short for “beatitude.” Not only do most high school kids struggle with this character from U.S. history — in what should be a very fun section — many high school teachers have only vague understanding of the whole Beat movement. Read the rest of this entry »
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
When the elder Fillmore’s Bathtub son attended intermediate school, he complained of the discipline. So did a lot of other good kids. We got a call from a parent asking if we’d join in a meeting with the new principal, and hoping to learn things were really hunky dory and offer assurances to our son, we went.
Royal typewriter, 1919.
Source: Emory Adams, The New Knowledge Library (Chicago: The S. A. Mullikin Company, 1919)
This image is licensed for educational use by FCIT. All images retrieved June 5, 2007, from http://etc.usf.edu/, specific images’ sites listed separately.
There you go: Legal clip art, properly attributed (though not necessarily properly footnoted — that’s another topic). How can you get more licensed clip art? See below the fold.
I don’t know the details of how or why this class is set up the way it is, but day after day they do things that other people use as textbook examples of what a good classroom ought to be doing, sometimes. And they do it day, after day, after day.
Side note: Looking at the photos, ask yourself, “Does our town offer these types of recreational facilities for use?” Washington has traditionally led the nation in setting aside land for public recreational use — this class has taken full advantage of being in a town that had the foresight to put up public art and public beaches, and otherpublicparks and places. There is a lesson here for city planners, and for mayors and city councils who wonder how they might support their schools, run by other governmental entities.
Finland is a leading example of the northern European view that a successful, competitive society should provide basic social services to all its citizens at affordable prices or at no cost at all. This isn’t controversial in Finland; it is taken for granted. For a patriotic American like me, the Finns present a difficult challenge: If we Americans are so rich and so smart, why can’t we treat our citizens as well as the Finns do?
Why not? Why can’t we treat our citizens as well as the Finns? Their system boosts their economy and leads to great social progress — which part of that do we not want?
School’s out in much of the nation, and won’t last much longer in the rest (except for full-year schools). It’s a good time to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what to change for next year. I was especially intrigued to learn that Mr. Teacher of Learn Me Good teaches in Dallas — close by, somewhere. One wonders how an alternative certification sneaked through the human resources shredder of the Dallas ISD to get a job, and one hopes it may show a trend; and then one wonders why DISD doesn’t pay more attention to the obvious success of the guy and go back to that alternative certification well. (HR departments in Texas school districts have reputations that they really don’t like alternative certification, even when the teachers work out well; one more indication that we don’t know what the heck we’re doing in education. My experience suggests the reputation is well-earned.) [See comment on alternative certification by Mr. Teacher, below.]
There is much, much more in the carnival. The Carnival of Education is an outstanding example of what blog carnivals can be — useful packages of information, summaries of the field they cover. Spread the word.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 